The Washington Post’s neologism contest winners.

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The Washington Post’s neologism contest winners.

December 2, 2019July 21, 2023 1889

I came across this today and broke up laughing. These are seriously clever! Thanks to the Washington Post. I wasn’t aware of their neologism contest, but I am now! Read and enjoy. Pass it along.

Good instincts usually tell you what to do long before your head has figured it out.

Michael Burke

I have a structured songwriting process. I start with the music and try to come up with musical ideas, then the melody, then the hook, and the lyrics come last.

John Legend

If you haven’t got an idea, start a story anyway. You can always throw it away, and maybe by the time you get to the fourth page you will have an idea, and you’ll only have to throw away the first three pages.

William C. Gault

Do you know what a playwright is? A playwright is someone who lets his guts hang out on the stage.

Edward Albee

The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.

Thomas Jefferson

You can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page.

Jodi Picoult

Critics are people who sit on the mountaintop and look down on the battlefield. When the fighting is finished, they take it upon themselves to come down from the mountain and shoot the survivors.

Robert Altman

I write the last line, and then I write the line before that. I find myself writing backwards for a while, until I have a solid sense of how that ending sounds and feels. You have to know what your voice sounds like at the end of the story, because it tells you how to sound when you begin.

John Irving

My aim is to put down what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way I can tell it.

Ernest Hemingway

Editor: A person employed by a newspaper, whose business it is to separate the wheat from the chaff, and to see that the chaff is printed.

Elbert Hubbard

The character that lasts is an ordinary guy with some extraordinary qualities.

Raymond Chandler

Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

E. L. Doctorow

It is perfectly okay to write garbage — as long as you edit brilliantly.

C. J. Cherryh

It’s an accepted fact that all writers are crazy; even the normal ones are weird.

William Goldman

I haven’t got 10 rules that guarantee success, though I promise I’d share them if I did. The truth is that I found success by stumbling off alone in a direction most people thought was a dead end, breaking all the 1990s shibboleths about children’s books in the process.

J.K. Rowling

Have something to say, and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret.

Matthew Arnold

Ever heard of a carpenter not going to work because he has “carpenter’s block”? If a writer can’t write, it’s because he doesn’t really want to, he isn’t ready to get it on paper or he’s just plain lazy.

Chet Cunningham

Substitute “damn” every time you’re inclined to write “very”; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.

Mark Twain

A blank piece of paper is God’s way of telling us how hard it to be God.

Sidney Sheldon

It always comes down to characters, and individual stories about courage.